You write "I am just afraid that what I'm doing doesn't count as good because I want the littlest thing out of it." That would only be true if actions had to be completely free of mixed motives to count as good. But that's not very plausible.

Consider two scenarios. In each of them, you're in a coffee shop. In each of them, the person at the next table gets up to leave, having forgotten to pick up the wallet that you see sitting on the table. In the first scenario, the person is someone you'd like to have an excuse to meet. In the second it's not.

Are you the kind of person who wouldn't do the right thing in the second case? If you are, you're right to worry about your moral state. If you are, then you're the sort of person who may do the right thing, but only if there's something in it for you. But I'm betting that in both cases, you'd get the person's attention and point out that s/he left the wallet behind. The fact that in one case, you have an extra reason doesn't show that you wouldn't be doing good.

We might put things metaphorically in terms of forces. In the case of the person you'd like to meet, there are two forces acting on you, getting you to make sure the wallet doesn't get left behind. One of those forces has nothing to do with doing right. But the other does, and if it would have been enough by itself, you're hardly to be blamed for getting a benefit as an incidental side effect of doing good.

My perception is that distinctions of the sort you describe can be found but that they are both largley modern and contextual. So, one might determine the distinction in Hegel, Rawls, Foucault, etc. rather than find a uniform distinction across texts. A quick search of JSTOR raises this article that seems to offer some historical contextualization:

“Theories of the Origin of the State in Classical Political Philosophy” by Harry Elmer Barnes, in a journal called “The Monist.”
Vol. 34, No. 1 (January, 1924), pp. 15-62.

Dwight Waldo’s book, The Administrative State (1948 but reissued in 2017 by Routledge), is a classic and makes an interesting distinction between the administrative and welfare state that may be helpful to you.

As for the importance of the distinction, I leave that to others with more expertise in political philosophy, but my perception is that it is not terribly central. You will find some discussion of elite theory among political scientists. Trotsky’s critique of the Stalinist USSR comes to mind as relatively important, too.

Less relevant to your main question is your elaboration of the distinction. That elaboration seems tendentiously freighted—and I’m curious about whether there’s a connection between the distinction you draw and the politics of your elaboration. You do raise important philosophical questions about the proper role and function of the state and what sort of compensation and taxation policies are fair and just. What strikes me as tendentious is that you use the practices of private economic organizations as a standard against which to measure those of the government. Why not the other way around? Why not use the public to judge the private? Perhaps it’s not that workers and officials in government are treating themselves and others improperly but that the private sector is treating owners and employees improperly. Perhaps the unfair, self-interested conduct is not properly located among government workers but among the owners and managerial class of the private sector who have hoarded for themselves the wealth generated by the economy, leaving others unjustly without pensions and generally with diminished compensation.

I lived during a time when private sector pensions and medical benefits were much more extensive and substantial than they are today, and I saw them whittled away over the decades. Perhaps that was the injustice. Similarly, perhaps the trouble is not that government employees wish to hold onto their benefits in the face of deficits but that deficits have been unjustly created either deliberately, through incompetence, or though neglect by those responsible for securing state revenue through taxation, etc. Perhaps through the use of their assets in political donations, lobbying, think tanks, etc., the wealthy have improperly advanced an ideology of austerity at the expense of the polity generally.

—Of course, this alternative view is arguably tendentious, too. I raise it to illuminate the apparent implication of the way you put things. You may have thought this all through on a philosophical level, but it may instead be that the distinction you’re after is a tool of political activism and ideology of which you’re unaware rather than sober political philosophy.

In a way, the answer to your question is that much of our civilization manifests the impact of philosophers. From our forms of government (Locke, Hegel, Hobbes, Rawls) and economics (Marx and Smith on socialism, free markets), to scientific inquiry (Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, and Newton), to ideas of self (Plato, to religious theologies (Aquinas, ibn Rushd), to important movements in the arts (Locke, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Schiller with Impressionism and Romanticism), to our practices of medicine (Kant and informed consent), to ideas about liberty (Spinoza, Mill, Locke, Sartre, Foucault), women’s rights (Beauvoir, Wollstonecraft, Butler), etc. etc. The list goes on and on. It’s hard, in fact, to think of a region of culture and society upon which philosophers have not have an impact. There’s much for you to explore, and it’s all very exciting. Have a great time learning about it!

I'd say no. (By the way, I'm not sure what "strong global" adds to "atheism," but let that pass.) The trouble is that the argument begs the question against various forms of theism. To state the most obvious problem, there are plenty of theists who think that God is already known to exist and has been for millennia. Now perhaps these theists are wrong, but in this context one can't simply assume that without argument.

Nor could you expect the theist simply to agree that knowledge of God is "extraordinary" compared to knowledge of the natural world. This is a topic that Alvin Plantinga has discussed extensively, but one of his persistent themes is that the theist is entitled to her beliefs without having to produce arguments for them; she is entitled to them as "basic beliefs," not unlike your belief that you are looking at a computer screen right now. Again, you might disagree, and Plantinga might be wrong. But once again, in this context you can't simply presume that he's wrong. (By the way: Plantinga goes further. He argues that pure naturalism can't make sense of knowledge of the natural world. I don't find his arguments convincing, but rebutting them takes a bit of work.)

Just to be clear: what I've said isn't an endorsement of theism; that's not the point. The question is whether theists are intellectually obliged to meet the burden that your argument would put them under. My point is simply that if they are, it would take a lot more to show it.

The external-world skeptic purports to show that I can't know any external-world proposition P. How about this response?

1. Conceptual analysis reveals that knowledge is nothing more than reliably produced true belief, where reliability falls far short of logical infallibility.

2. If knowledge is nothing more than reliably produced true belief, then the skeptic's sensitivity condition on knowledge is false: I can have a reliably produced true belief that P, and hence knowledge that P, even if I would falsely believe that P if I were being deceived by an evil demon. (Analogy: My gas-engine car can be reliable even if it wouldn't work at all if it were on the airless surface of the moon.)

3. In particular, I can have a reliably produced true belief, and hence knowledge, that I'm not being deceived by an evil demon even if, were I being deceived by an evil demon, my belief that I'm not being deceived would not be reliably produced.

The skeptic then predictably asks: "But how do you know that your belief of P was reliably produced?" If my proposed analysis is correct, that question goes to the issue of how I know that I know that P, and second-order knowledge (my knowing that I know that P) isn't required for my first-order knowledge that P.

When people argue for capital punishment, one of the considerations they sometimes raise is deterrence. We can ask about general deterrence: does the death penalty tend to lower the murder rate? That's not your question. But we can also ask about specific deterrence: do we need the death penalty to keep particular, especially dangerous murderers from killing again? Someone could argue that death penalty statutes need provisions to deal with cases of the sort you've described: murderers who are likely to be a serious danger even if they're incarcerated.

I'll confess that I find it hard to imagine a case where we had no other way of protecting guards and other inmates; far as I know, so-called super-max prisons already do that, though of course I could be wrong about how well they succeed.* If your question is whether there's a potentially legitimate question here, I'd say the answer is yes. But whether it will amount to an important part of a case for capital punishment, all things considered, is harder to say. It will depend at least partly on how serious the worry you raise actually is in practice. As I've said, my instinct is that we don't need capital punishment to protect guards and other inmates. But as I also said, I don't actually know how effective the means we already have for addressing this problem are.

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* There are other questions about super-max prisons, such as whether the extreme solitary confinement they use is unconstitutionally cruel. I think there's a case for saying that it is, but I'm not about to insist on that.

There's a strong case for saying that Joe really isn't any morally better than an actual thief. It's just fluke luck that separates Joe from Moe, who actually stole the neighbor's wallet a little later that day. Among others, you certainly have Kant on your side; Joe lacks what Kant calls a good will, and Kant though that a good will is the only thing that's truly good.

As for whether Joe is "sinning" by wanting to steal from his neighbor, having an impulse probably doesn't count as a "sin," though sin is not a notion that has much currency in contemporary ethical theory. Just how one ought to deal with such impulses is an interesting question. The obvious first answer is by resisting the temptation, and that's fine as far as it goes. Giving in to the temptation is wrong, even if lucky circumstance has it that the giving in doesn't end up going anywhere. If we want to use the word "sin," we might want to say that forming the intention to do wrong is already wrong, even if nothing comes of it.

But your first question was whether having immoral thoughts is enough to make a person immoral. If the question is whether on balance a person who sometimes has immoral thoughts is immoral, then saying yes will almost certainly entail that pretty much all of us are immoral. I don't find that to be a very helpful thought, though it's one that Pauline Christianity seems to embrace. It seems enough to say that we all fall short of the glory of fully-developed goodness, and some of us may even be unequivocally evil, but in spite of that, there are people who don't deserve to be called immoral, even though they aren't perfect. In short, there really are good people.

It doesn't seem difficult to solve, if we're willing to accept more than one universe. Analogy: There are infinitely many numbers that are even, infinitely many numbers that are odd, and infinitely many numbers that are neither even nor odd (because they aren't integers). The infinity of numbers satisfying the description "even" and the infinity of numbers satisfying the description "odd" doesn't preclude an infinity of numbers satisfying "neither even nor odd." It would be paradoxical only if there had to be numbers satisfying more than one of those descriptions.

The problem simply recurs with the phrase "at the base camp" in your definition: Which millimeters of terrain belong to the base camp, and which do not? At the limit, nobody knows. But unless there is a sharp cutoff between those millimeters that belong to the base camp and those that do not, the sorites paradox shows that the phrase "at the base camp" has logically inconsistent conditions of application, and therefore either nothing is at the base camp or the entire earth is at the base camp.

I see no hope of solving the sorites paradox for one vague phrase, such as "Mt. Everest" or "a heap," by appealing to some other vague phrase, such as "at the base camp or higher" or "what someone I'm communicating with recognizes to be a heap." If only it were that easy.

I’m not sure I fully grasp the motivation behind your question, but here’s a guess as to how you may be reasoning:

A punishment can be ethically indefensible if it is too severe, either in its own right (50 years of continuous physical torture, say) or in proportion to the seriousness of the crime (a decade in prison for petty theft, for instance, would be excessive). If life in prison is worse than execution, then if the death penalty should be opposed because it is too severe, then we should also oppose life in prison, since if the death penalty is too severe, and life in prison is (by stipulation) worse, then life in prison must also be too severe. So if this reasoning is correct, then either
(a) both the death penalty and life in prison should be rejected on moral grounds for being too severe – a position that some may hold but many will reject on the basis that life in prison is not necessarily too severe
(b) the death penalty must not be as bad as we think, and should not be opposed.

Before addressing the reasoning here, let me say that (a) does not strike me as so implausible a stance. In my estimation, we tend to underestimate the badness of life incarceration, and in particular, the ways in which the unrelenting infringements on a person’s liberty, etc., are bad for a person. So perhaps both punishments really are too severe.

That said, there are, I’d say, two places where this reasoning seems open to question.

The first concerns your thought that life in prison is ‘worse’ than death. For one, how bad life incarceration is depends a great deal on prison conditions. Whatever its hardships, life in a Scandinavian minimum security facility is not anywhere near as bad for an inmate as life imprisonment in a US-style supermax facility that uses prolonged solitary confinement, etc. So whether life imprisonment is worse than death will turn on contingent facts. Moreover, we might question an assumption that seems hidden in your question, namely, that how bad something is depends only on its experiential properties. Suppose we grant that the experience of life incarceration is (often) worse than the ‘experience’ of death. (Note the quote marks there; I’m assuming that death is the permanent cessation of selfhood, that there’s no afterlife, that death is not something we experience, etc. — debatable propositions, yes, but let’s operate with these assumptions for now.) In other words, undergoing prolonged suffering behind bars will often be worse than simply not existing. Nevertheless, it may not follow from this that incarceration is worse than death, given that death may deprive a person of a life she wishes to keep living or of goods that she would have enjoyed had she continued to live until her natural death. (Note that these considerations make the badness of execution contingent on what kind of future a person is deprived of, how long she has to live, etc.) The death penalty may therefore be worse for a person’s overall lifetime well-being even if being dead is not worse than spending life behind bars. (Incidentally, I take it that the fact that almost every condemned prisoner exhausts their appeals before being executed is an indication that there is at least something worthwhile about continuing to live, even in the very adverse conditions life incarceration presents.)

A second set of questions we might raise about this reasoning is whether the severity of punishment is the only moral grounds for opposing a punishment. We might conclude, in connection with the death penalty for example, that it tends to be allocated in ways that are unjust — that defendants from certain social groups are more likely to be executed, etc. Note that these are moral considerations against the death penalty that don’t turn on how bad it is (or how bad it is in comparison to alternatives such as life imprisonment). Or one might oppose the death penalty believing it’s too risky for a society to impose. Death, as many have said, seems different than other punishments; it’s ‘final’, irrevocable, incompensable, unappealable, etc., in ways that other punishments may not be. So perhaps the reasons to morally oppose the death penalty is that societies ought not to risk imposing a penalty that’s unique in having these properties.